>>14789458I agree wholeheartedly with this notion but would add in the notion of either some Lovecraftian horror aspect, or simply time magic in some manner, to give them extra lives, essentially.
Part of any campaign is the highs and lows of getting things done, or having to run like hell because things went bad and all options fail you. If you don't have the former, the latter just crushes you. Basically, have however much of the ToH as you feel appropriate in a row, and give your players a very specific and distinct mark that all of them have. Every time they die or fail spectacularly they get another mark, but respawn at the last checkpoint any of them got to.
Once they reach a certain number they have to pass checks at your discretion, or are consumed. By what? That's up to you to decide, dependent on how you run things. Anyhow, if all of them die before reaching a checkpoint, they get circumstance bonuses to the traps they know and can blow through those, only to have to deal with a new terror once they're partially comfortable.
If you can somehow include the disappearing/reappearing blocks from Heat Man's stage in Megaman 2 into all this, I'd love to hear some followup stories from you.
